Armin van Buuren is my favourite DJ, so I was very excited to get my hands on [[amazon:B0000C3I4C 76]], his first album of original works. It is a fairly solid offerring, although it doesn’t deliver the number of heart-wrenching emotions and euhporic highs that most of his compliation/mix albums have.

For the most part, this is not a dance-floor-ready trance CD. It is more down-tempo and dreamy than I would prefer for dancing. Armin seems to be holding back from producing tracks for the sake of floor-thumping. Those types of tracks do exist on this album, but they’re interwoven with more ambient / mood-setting works.

There are several version of Armin’s singles on here that we’ve all heard to death ie Yet Another Day and Communication. There is a remake of Armin’s debut single Blue Fear, now with more synths (tm). Stay is apparently a remake of a song by the Dutch rock band Krezip. Sunburn is some good trance, although play it concurrently with Perpetuous Dreamer’s (another Armin project) Dust.wav and the similarities will be striking. Seriously, beat match them and they’ll play on top of each other pretty well.

There are also some nice assists from the trance gods Airwave and System F, Victoria Horn, and the venerable Justine Suissa. Definitely be sure to check out Precious, Stay, Wait For You, Sunburn, and Slipstream.

All in all, a solid album from my favourite trance DJ/Producer. I hope he will continue to evolve, and bring the trance listening community along for the ride. I can only imagine where he’ll take us.